Explore: Explore space generated in real time around you
Design: design you own ship or space station.
Customize: create customized weapons, harvesting elements, shields and docking stations for your ship. Combine elements to groups to make your modules even more powerful.
Multiplayer: full multi player: share control of your ship or design a ship together
Destroy: destroy your enemies with your powerful weapons or just infiltrate an enemy ship. There already is a big arsenal of destructive modules: Missiles (normal, heat seeking and target chasing), Lasers, and Explosive modules that detonate on impact
Salvage: salvage the ships of your fallen enemies to gain credits
Physics: fully integrated modern physics engine for real box-on-box collisions
Stealth: use radar jamming and cloaking modules for a surprise attack.
Multiplatform: runs on windows, mac and linux
Share: save, import & export your own ships as blueprints. You can upload your blueprints to any multi player server
AI: fight your own creations alone or in coop mode
Tutorial: interactive tutorial to learn the basics

It is in alpha. If you would like to know more, please click on the hyperlinks above.]

I won’t say ‘that word’ but will instead post this fan-made video which for some reason absolutely delighted me. Maybe because the music reminds me of Fringe? Or I like space a good deal more than I realized.

Not every article should be SPACE HULK – there’s probably a fair bit of interesting and useful content that could be included in this article.

Speaking of content:
This game is promising as hell, but it’s very unbalanced at the moment (in about half an hour of playing with a ship made from starting blocks I managed to loot enough stuff to reach the maximum number of credits it was possible to carry, resulting in error messages every time I tried to sell anything).

This could go really cool places once it’s expanded and polished, conceptually it’s really fantastic and the way they’ve done the flat planets is very cute.

It’s really quite relieving (for me..) to find that I’m not the only one that feels this way. I don’t even get how the joke started other than that there’s a game with a corny name, but why that has to be constantly thrown in with every other game is beyond me. And this is why I’ve never said anything, because I dint want to come off like a jerk. :/

Yeah RPS should ignore these sour humourless types. It’s the comment section that continually runs every joke into the ground, not the RPS staff. The humourless bunch are almost as bad as the pollitical correctness gone mad crowd.

I don’t think every post needs to have some indepth commentary about the state of a game or it’s goals when pure excitement and a nice trailer will do. Think of it more like a Twitter link…just for those of us that appreciate things like this being brought to our attention but don’t shamble ourselves over to that corner of the internet.

But really, how can you compare this to the work of pure journalistic art that was Alec Meer’s SPACE HULK? That was on a totally different level to this.

As for the game, looking good. Really like the planet generation and being able to create AI ships to fight against or the servers mimicking player made ships…more of this in games please! *looks longingly at Spore*

There are plenty of sites (like allgamesbeta.com) that just spit out the videos and images for us to look at, but I come to RPS to get information from informed gamers or at least some discussion on the game being shown. Lately I would have to agree that most articles seem like they are just throwing some metaphoric story or quick joke down so they don’t have to spend the time to research the games talked about.

While I come to this site for the very reason, I just feel like these sort of posts are extra. We’re still getting the great content we always used to (if not more) – this is just a little bit of a fun to pass the time (and on slow news days or if a bigger feature isn’t planned, it makes visiting this site all the more entertaining for me).

Not saying anyones opinion is wrong of course! I’m just voicing my thoughts on the subject matter as well. And as we’ve seen, even a post like this has bought up some interesting discussion :)

If the *only* thing we were getting were posts like this, I’d likely take issues with it too. But I feel at the moment they’re striking a good balance between great indepth articles, funny side stories and the odd “Post contains trailer, watch trailer!” – especially when it’s a game like this and not your standard triple A blurb.

If you think humourous articles are some sort of recent trend, then I take it you haven’t been reading RPS for very long. It’s been a base principle of their writing since day one, and has been the prime draw for a lot of people.

EDIT: And again I say: If you think “most” recent articles have been this way, then surely you can provide some other recent examples.

“Speaking of content:
This game is promising as hell, but it’s very unbalanced at the moment”

Hence the “Alpha” comment in the article. I would hope that anyone that sees the word “alpha” attached to a game automatically realizes that everything is not 100 balanced in a game. I don’t ever recall an alpha being balanced..

My enthusiasm petered out when I completely failed to recreate the Defiant and ended up with a kind of indistinct pancake with handles. It could be a great game, but I’m no Sisko when it comes to starship design.

Blockade Runner seems to be moving away from the “obvious blocks” aesthetic that StarMade still favours. They don’t seem to have released any new versions in quite a while, and in fact their news mailer seems to have gone quiet too.

From what I see Blockaderunner is not able to deliver what they planned because of technical restrictions, lack of coding skills/experience and bad project planning. Easy to review when you check how often they had to change/adjust their core mechanics/ -engine.
Still hope that they get the ball rolling in a near future.

Sad really. I backed the wrong block space builder. Strange as this game is free for now. There were a few others that had some prospects, but not sure what happened.

In all honesty, blocks in space does not work. You need to at least expand out to tris (some games have done this, but not in a space setting AFAIK). Or something like Google Sketchup construction, or even full on high res voxels.

This game is more EVE than EVE.
– no empire. All is 0.0
– full destructible ships
– full looting ships
– player skill base + economy
– visitable planets
– full player designed ships
– servers crash every 15 seconds and is still more funspace exploration than most games
– easy. Idiots like me can understand it and build stuff

EDIT:
– You can walk inside stations, ships, bases,…
– Multiple people can control a ship
– You can build AI-controlled turrets

This game is the most cool game of this year, If not where for the server crashing every 9 seconds.

Mrs. Ellison, Kudos for your bad journalistc skills and for censoring my reply about your very bad report about this indie game. Ive stated that I will avoid any further journalistc attempts of Mrs. Ellison in the future and it was deleted. It just proved my stance. Thanks.

“1) Don’t insult anyone, whether they’re an RPS writer, reader or anyone else whether present or not. Clearly you’re welcome to explain your dissatisfaction with something, but if you can’t make your argument without resorting to insults, it simply isn’t worth making. So the comment may well be deleted. Additional to this: any replies to objectionable comments may also be wiped.”

Cara doesn’t have a coloured background and thus probably has no access to moderator functions. Over years of study I’ve built a map of user levels and access rights to rockpapershotgun. This helpful chart should explain it all.

I’ve enjoyed playing this, and look forward to future builds, polish and balance. I like that they are trying to build in a level of modding capability into the game. I need to find some HD textures such as in the link as the current textures do get a bit eyesoreish…. Its also worth the reminder this passed Steam Greenlight so should be on steam at some point. In the mean time its free to go play now and cheap if you want to buy beta/final.

I heartily approve of the AI Blocks. Once upon a time, in the early 80s, mankind had access to programmable personal computers where you could type commands in BASIC. Just a few decades later there were even goddamned iPhones which absorbed the functions of all analog comunication and entertainment devices thanks to digital technology.

This completely flew in the face of classic 60s and 70s science fiction which assumed Big Computers of the time would become Big Computers In Space. And now we have a game that does that very thing! Each 1 meter by 1 meter block representing a single line of code: Absolutely brilliant.

Man some people seem to think games should be treated like war correspondence. They’re not reporting drone attacks on schools. You grumps are as tedious as the commenters that mindlessly repeat those jokes you seem to hate so much.

I think he meant to say something along these lines: ‘”Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space”‘

GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM GAME JOURNALISM–

But seriously this game is nothing like EVE Online and plays more like grindy mcgrindgrind to be able to build big ships.

Combat is rather basic and ship design is literally about shoving as much technocrap into it as you can.